Posted on 01/05/2004 10:54:36 AM PST by Rebelbase
For nearly 40 years, the album has been the main currency of pop music and its No. 1 source of debate.
Is Abbey Road better than Rubber Soul? Is Nevermind really the greatest rock album of the '90s? Is Britney's new album lame or what?
But questions like that may soon be as dead as the eight-track tape.
With the recent boom in 99-cent-per-song downloading sites, music fans are cherry-picking their favourite tunes and ignoring full-length albums - much to the dismay of musicians who spend months crafting them.
The album's glory days could be history, with three-minute singles ruling the music world as they did in the 1950s. That shake-up would not only affect the record labels' bottom line but might also transform the way pop music is created and heard.
"I see the demise as inevitable," says singer David Bowie. "In the future, it'll all be in the hands of the fans, who'll cut and paste whatever songs they want. The artist will have no control over it."
Yet not everyone is ready to bury the album. Some high-profile musicians insist that the album - not the song - is the be-all of pop music, and they argue that fans shouldn't be able to carve random pieces off an album any more than readers should be able to buy one chapter of a book.
"We have to be the ones who decide what happens to our music," says Lars Ulrich of Metallica. "We conceive entire albums, and I'm not gonna give it to you in any other form than the one I conceive. ... You can dissect it after that if you want, but at least you have to respect our choice."
Metallica is among a handful of acts that refuse to sell their songs a la carte over the Web. John Mayer, Linkin Park and the Beastie Boys are also bucking the 99-cent song trend by only allowing their complete albums to be downloaded for $9.99. But they might be fighting a lost cause. Album sales have dropped 20 per cent since 2000, according to Nielsen SoundScan, and all eyes are fixed on new digital music shops such as Musicmatch, BuyMusic and Apple's iTunes, which has sold more than 25 million songs since it started in April. Unlike brick-and-mortar record stores that deal mostly in full-length CDs, the internet stores focus on songs. At iTunes, single downloads are outselling albums roughly 15-to-1.
"It's a song economy now," says iTunes spokesman Chris Bell. "Consumers have come to expect it through illegal file sharing and CD burning, and we're making sure every song is available for individual downloading."
The company's slogan - "iTunes is designed for instant gratification" - points to the biggest reason why albums may be withering. With attention spans shrinking and music outlets multiplying (on TV, satellite radio and in cyberspace), people aren't as willing to sit through an entire album as they were in the past.
Super-size albums are making the problem worse. The 35-minute album of yesteryear has been replaced by 60- and 70-minute epics, in part because compact discs fit more music than LPs and tapes did. But the marathon albums are also a result of musicians trying to justify the $18 or $19 cost of a CD.
"It's like, 'How much music can I cram on there?' and the albums just get weaker and weaker," says Joe Levy, a Rolling Stone senior editor who helped compile the magazine's recent "500 Greatest Albums of All Time" issue.
"It's not just the download services that are chipping away at people's interest in albums; it's the bloat that's been created ever since CDs were introduced."
In the '50s, rock 'n' roll revolved around the 45-rpm single. Albums - if record labels even bothered to put them out - were just ragtag compilations of unrelated singles. But the psychedelic '60s turned that upside down. With the Beatles and Bob Dylan knocking out songs at a rapid-fire clip, the 33-rpm album became the best way to get them to the marketplace.
Spurred on by free-form FM radio, musicians started writing longer songs and weaving whole albums around a musical or lyrical theme: The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), The Who's rock opera Tommy (1969), Marvin Gaye's socially conscious What's Going On (1971).
Suddenly, rock 'n' roll was no longer just a random parade of ditties blaring from an AM car radio. Thanks to the album, rock was an official art form, worthy of being analysed on hi-fi stereos and dissected in The New York Times - just like jazz or classical music.
By the mid-'70s, concept albums were standard fare in pop music, from Willie Nelson's Western fable Red Headed Stranger to Pink Floyd's stoner-rock song cycle, Dark Side of the Moon.
Even if albums didn't have a theme, bands treated them as indivisible works of art, which helped boost their egos as well as their bank accounts: When Stairway to Heaven became the rage of FM radio in the early '70s, Led Zeppelin refused to put it out as a single, a ploy that catapulted sales of the group's fourth, untitled album.
Record labels took a similar approach in the '80s and began phasing out singles to force music fans to buy full-length CDs. But not everyone was convinced the album was infallible.
"I've never found an album - even a Beatles album - where every song on it was great," says B.B. King, who now listens to his favourite tunes on an MP3 player.
R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck agrees. "I can't tell you how many albums I bought back in the vinyl days and only listened to one side."
Post-punk bands such as R.E.M. formed as a reaction to the bloated "art-rock" albums of bands like Yes and Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Even as singles began vanishing from record stores in the '80s, people began clamouring for their return.
"Singles are the essence of rock 'n' roll ... Nobody goes around humming albums," rock historian Dave Marsh wrote in his 1989 book The Heart of Rock & Soul: The 1,001 Greatest Singles Ever Made.
Today's post-Napster generation goes by the same philosophy. Armed with hand-held MP3 players, music listeners have turned into free-range DJs, playing their favourite singles whenever and wherever they want.
But don't hit "eject" on full-length CDs just yet. Though the album may be faltering, the pay-to-download sites account for a small percentage of all music sold, and most musicians still plot their careers in terms of albums, not songs.
This year, concept albums have been coming back in vogue (Neil Young's Greendale, Mars Volta's De-loused in the Comatorium), as have heady, experimental works such as Erykah Badu's Worldwide Underground.
"I'm an analog girl in a digital world. ... I don't even have the internet," says Badu.
"I have faith that real music lovers will always want to hear every little bit of an album," says singer Edie Brickell. "Artists will have to get more creative with websites to encourage people to listen to the whole thing ... but the album is still such a great concept."
And if musicians keep sticking to the concept, the iTunes nation could eventually get over its album phobia.
"Ultimately, the fate of the album is in the hands of the artist," says Rolling Stone's Levy. "If they keep making great albums, the album will survive."
| Rank | Location | Receipts | Donors/Avg | Freepers/Avg | Monthlies | |||
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4 |
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It used to happen, in fact I think it must have been required. I haven't bought a newly-released album in ten years.
To bad and I like Metallica...but welcome to ash heap of music.
Personally, when artists start putting out WHOLE albums I'll start buying whole albums again. As it is, I only buy albums of artists that have proven thier ability to produce a quality album.(Jimmy Buffet, Toby Kieth, Hank Jr. to name a few).
Other than a handpicked few, I refuse to shell out my hard earned money for 1 song and 9-15 pieces of SH*T.
The art of depth AND simplicity is gone......verbal diarrhea seems to be the rule.
Imagine that.
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